Roland Mas wrote in message ...
>
>  Huuh?  See the number of patches that are published these days?
>

Indeed. But there are a number of very useful things, like non-linear
transformations, which, IMHO, can't be done - not without very substantial
core modifications.


>
>  Whaaaat?  Are you *really* meaning that?  Backwards compatibility
>not to be considered a major requirement?  Makes me jump on my seat
>each time I read that.  How dare you speak of easy extension if you
>abandon backward compatibility?
>


I tend to agree, backward compatibility is important. Otherwise, the work of
many people, in the form of plugins, tutorials etc. would come to nothing.
But this should not be a dogma. Some compatibility will have to be
sacrificed, and has been sacrificed before, to facilitate future
improvements.

>> (No more specially preparing image files for height fields.)
>
>  You'll have to forgive me for that, but that sounds like one of the
>biggest pieces of nonsense I've ever heard.  How do you intend to
>generate height fields without specially prepared images?  Randomly?
>

Internally. This is already possible in the Superpatch. In essence, you
assign a height pattern, like a normal pattern. No need to create a separate
scene, plane, orthographic camera etc., render it and use the resulting
bitmap for the heigtfield.

>  Variable IOR means bent rays, which is kind of a huge piece of work
>to do.  I agree on the use of these features, though.
>


I suppose this _could_ be simulated with volume sampling, like in media. But
that's my uneducated guess.

>
>> We are speaking of a real interpreter here, with function calls and
>> user objects.  (The current macro language is already a step in that
>> direction, and it should be taken further.)
>
>  Wake up man, you're *describing scenes*, not programming!  Is life
>object oriented?  Are your car and fridge objects with attributes and
>methods?  How often do you call the tap.open() or the window.close()
>functions?
>

You could call it programming (well, scripting). How much so, depends on the
particular user. And of fourse POV _objects_ are objects, and can be
instanced with different attributes. But I know too little about OOP to make
any definitive case here.

Margus

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